🤯 Precision Kills Influence
We often believe that being right is our greatest asset.
We tell ourselves that if we have the data and the granular truth then our influence should be absolute.
I recently worked with a CMO who was a master of the details. He was disciplined and thorough but he was completely out of sync with his CEO.
She was a classic visionary. She moved fast and relied on intuition. Every time he went to her with an update he brought a mountain of context.
He thought he was being responsible. She felt like she was being slowed down by a massive weight.
His impact was capped because his communication was cluttered.
The Shift: The Burden of Context
When we sat down, he was frustrated. He felt she did not want to hear the reality of the market.
I pushed him to look deeper. We did not talk about his campaigns. We talked about his identity. I asked him a question that changed his perspective:
Are you providing her with clarity or are you asking her to carry the weight of your anxiety?
That hit home.
He realized his thoroughness was actually a safety blanket. By giving her every detail, he felt protected if things went wrong.
But in reality, he was forcing her to do his job.
He was making her filter the noise to find the signal.
He had to stop being the person who knows everything and start being the leader who decides what matters.
🤯 What > Why > So What?
To fix this, we stripped his communication down to a three step filter.
If an update could not pass through these three gates in under a minute, it was not ready to be shared.
Reframing: Leaked Press Release
We practiced this using a real crisis.
A leaked press release for their new consumer brand hit the blogs two days early.
The Old Way:
I just got off the phone with the PR agency. Well actually it was a zoom as the person was travelling. An intern there accidentally hit publish on the draft server instead of the staging one at 4:07 AM. I have tracked the logs and confirmed it was a permissions error on their end. I have a meeting scheduled with their lead at noon to go over security. I am drafting a formal reprimand letter now. One blog already has a screenshot and they are not taking it down. I am quite worried about this.
The New Way:
What: Our new product details leaked early to a major blog.
Why: A technical error at our PR firm bypassed our embargo.
So What: The news is already out. We are moving the official announcement up to 9:00 AM today to own the narrative. I need you to approve the revised social media captions below in the next 10 minutes.
The Result
The change was immediate. The CEO did not just start listening. She started leaning on him for guidance.
By removing the noise, he allowed his expertise to finally be visible. He gave the high level framing and she was then able to ask for the specific level of detail if she needed it.
He stopped being the data guy and became the partner she actually needed.
If we want to lead at the highest level, we have to stop making people work to understand us. We have to do that work for them.
Are you giving your stakeholders a map or are you just handing them a pile of rocks and telling them it is a mountain?
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